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They could use Bing. From personal experience Google is much better. I make the assumption that crippled Google will still be much better than crippled Bing.

I have no illusions about Google creating social change. That's not the point. Google will make it much easier than Bing to find information you need. It is more convenient. It could save lives in the right situations. That's enough of a sell for me.

Why is having Google in China going to get anyone killed? If Google isn’t there they’ll just search Baidu or Bing and whatever was going to happen is still going to happen. It’s just another search engine, albeit a much better one than what’s already there.

China suppresses free speech, yes. But it doesn’t go so far as citizens being terrified of being known as someone wanting Google to enter China. It’s not like 1984. The secret police isn’t going to come stick you and your family in an underground prison for wanting Google.

People are pretty open about what they want. Google is something many people (who know about it) want.

FWIW, yes, I could be propaganda. But if I were, I’d be doing something much more useful with my time than browsing hackernews and trying to argue against opinionated software engineers who don’t want to be convinced otherwise.

His GitHub profile looks like just a normal guy. Maybe China keeps a bunch of GitHub accounts around and makes active commits for the purpose, and posts homework solutions while they are at it. Maybe I’m a propaganda bot.

> A censored search engine will save millions of lives? Reads like propaganda to me.

What in the world does censorship have to do with this? Information will strictly be more available by having Google in China, than not having Google in China. Google is orders of magnitude better than Baidu, which makes not even a superficial attempt at hiding that it censors and reranks information. DragonFly will simply not allow you to search censored phrases, rather than selectively remove results.

As to why I think it’ll save lives. Let me give you an example. I once tried to search for the US consulate in China on Baidu. The phrase for that is “美国领事馆”. Try it on Baidu. When I last searched it, the website for the consulate was on the 3rd or 4th page, the address was nowhere on Baidu, and the rest of the results were travel agencies trying to make a profit.

Now think about searching for “suicide” or “depression”. Still think it won’t save lives?

Not everything has to be about censorship and human rights with China. Partial information can still save lives.

> Democratized information... with Chinese characterisitics.

Yes, what’s your point? America was built on democracy with a nice twist of slavery.

I'm really glad someone with a Chinese background finally spoke up about this. If you look at the anti-DragonFly post, you'll notice that there are almost no Chinese names on the list. Every Chinese citizen I've talked to is pro-DragonFly, myself included.

DragonFly will probably be the largest step to democratizing information that has ever happened for the Chinese people. It's a huge step forward. It won't change the fact that the Chinese government already does censor information, and that it does spy on its people. This isn't new. DragonFly will just provides Chinese citizens so much more information that we can't get otherwise without resorting to VPNs.

For the people in China who aren't dissidents (a large chunk of the 1.4 billion, or 4x the population of the US), this will be an entirely positive change that could save millions of lives.

Please, please launch DragonFly.